What Does the MAGA New Right Think?

Archon Fung: Hey, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement. This is episode 22. I’m Archon Fung, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. I think Stephen might be having some technical difficulties … So, as always, we are speaking as individuals and not behalf of Harvard or the Kennedy School or the Ash Center.

Stephen Richer: I think I’m here now.

Archon Fung: Hey, Stephen …

[Hold for technical difficulties]

Stephen Richer: All right, well, today we’re going to be talking about MAGA, and we’re going to be talking about the different factions within MAGA. And to do that, we are going to be bringing on a wonderful guest, former professor, Dr. Laura Field. And she has recently written a book, and I’m going to pull it up here. Her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, explores how a new generation of radical conservative intellectuals are shaping President Donald Trump’s agenda and, in the process, threatening core principles of liberal democracy. You know, that’s a little bit of the take on it.

Laura has a BA and MA from the University of Alberta and a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a writer, a political theorist, and an expert on the American right populist movement, and she is based in Washington, D.C. So welcome, Laura.

Laura Field: Hi, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Stephen Richer: Okay, so we both read your book, and I guess I would start with: who is the intended audience of the book?

Laura Field: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, it’s on the trade side of Princeton. So, it was aiming for a general readership. You know, I’m trained as a political theorist, but I tried to kind of write the book in a way that would be broadly appealing or interesting to people. I thought academics would find it useful just because so much of what’s happening now on the right has to do with higher education. And so, I thought that would be good.

And also sort of never-Trumpers, but also maybe people a little further to the right who were maybe just sort of understanding for the first time what’s going on now. And, you know, these upsets at the Heritage Foundation or some of these cleavages we’re seeing, I think that maybe some people were caught by surprise by that, who didn’t take it seriously, didn’t think that MAGA had taken over the party in such a way. So the book is intended to help people like that.

And just for general readers, you know, and I was thinking it covers a lot of different camps and groups, and I know we’ll get into that, but part of it’s also about the manosphere and the influencers on what I call the hard right. And so, as a mother, I wanted to have a record of some of that. I think parents might find it useful, who are trying to kind of grapple — I have two young boys. So that’s another intended audience.

Stephen Richer: I told you when we were chatting just previously that I’m an alumnus of American Enterprise Institute, which is mentioned in the book. I’m an Intercollegiate Studies Institute honors fellow alumnus, University of Chicago. So I found it fascinating just from a pure biographical standpoint in that you tell the stories of a number of these influential writers, thinkers who have put together, I guess, the intellectual fabric of the new right, as we term it in many circumstances. But is the book meant to persuade anyone? And if so, I guess, on what points is the persuasive argument meant to be delivered?

Laura Field: So, I think I was trying to do a bunch of different things. I wanted to just have an explainer with the book, right? To kind of profile some of the important people involved, explain the ideas, chronicle the creation of the formation of this movement. And I also wanted to convey why some of it’s seductive. You sort of know some of these groups, right? And I sort of came up in conservative Straussian circles, so people who had followed the teachings of Leo Strauss and were sort of deep in the books and the weeds of the great books tradition, canonical political philosophy. And the book has a lot to do with Straussians — I mean, I want to say not all Straussians because most Straussians I know didn’t go in for MAGA, but the sort of leading group of that world did, the kind of Claremont Institute, the leading political activists of the Straussian world were some of the forerunners of the intellectual Trumpism.

And so I wanted to convey how a person could get seduced by some of this stuff and to be sort of drawn into the conservative intellectual circles. And on that point, I was trying to be persuasive. I was trying to demonstrate that I’m very sympathetic to just within the world of higher education, some of the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy that are wielded and exploited by the MAGA new right. And so that’s sort of where I was working on the persuasive level, trying to show sort of normie liberals why this is happening, some of the deeper undercurrents, some of the deep vulnerabilities of  liberalism that have made this possible and potentially, you know, what to do about that, how to start thinking differently about that.

So I think on that plane, I was trying to be persuasive. On the other hand, I was also trying to sort of send a warning shot. You know, this stuff is far more radical than a lot of the average voters, in the GOP included. I think that there are a lot of people out there who are independents or Republicans who are drawn to Trump for all kinds of reasons, many of which are historically contingent and have to do with problems in our country. And they don’t necessarily understand how radical some of the thinkers are who are now driving a lot of what’s happening on the right.

Stephen Richer: Archon, how did it hit you as somebody less steeped, perhaps historically, in the movement, in some of these outfits?

Archon Fung: Yeah, I thought that the book — first of all, I just thought it was terrific. And it had kind of two big messages: one was a little bit less surprising to me, but might be surprising to some normie liberals. One is that there are ideas at all; that it’s not just politics that’s driving it. I remember when I was reading your book, I was reflecting on this conversation I had a couple of years ago with a prominent member of Congress or used to be a member of Congress. And I was saying, you know, ‘I just don’t understand after January 6, what are these Republican leaders thinking with the fist pump? And like, do you think you’re going to be in power forever and there’s not going to be any comeback?’

And her response was, ‘These people aren’t political theorists. They’re politicians.’ But here you’re saying, no, well, there is a whole set of political theories behind it. So that’s one. And then I’m really excited for this conversation, and I hope a lot of people on the show and elsewhere will read the book, because I think the other part of the news is the radical nature of these ideas. I think a lot of normie liberals are thinking, ‘Oh, it’s like Trump-driven or it’s competition more or less within the rules of the liberal democratic game.’ And you do just a great job of saying, ‘No. From all of these different schools, it’s rejecting a bunch of those fundamental rules.’

Stephen Richer: So can you dig in on both points one and two that Archon just made? First, I guess I would be curious to hear you respond to somebody who says, ‘Well, MAGA is whatever Trump says it is.’ And all of the people that you’re writing about are just trying to do a clever dance to build up an intellectual infrastructure that has to be very flexible and very malleable to whatever President Trump does. And then I’ll turn to the second one. So can you respond to that?

Laura Field: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s hard not to be sympathetic to that. There’s something going on with Trump — that’s partly true. I’m not saying Trump is being controlled by these dark actors, but it doesn’t capture the story. And the way I think of it is that Trump is kind of given cover because of his anti-intellectualism, because of his charisma and verve or whatever it is. He almost tricks you into thinking that there aren’t these ideologues operating behind the scenes. And I think that at the very beginning that was true, but very quickly — and I think this would happen in any political movement — very quickly these intellectuals came in and they started to fill that vacuum.

And they weren’t doing it based on nothing. They were also drawing on this recognition that Trump represented something sort of pure in the conservative mind that had been present on the fringes since the beginning and constantly ebbed and flowed. And what I’m talking about is basically populism and the old right isolationism, Pat Buchanan, paleo-conservatism —  all these different strains of isolationism, small government radicalism, and a kind of nativism, right? Trump just sort of intuitively was channeling that, and they saw that, and they had all these resources; they had been steeped — I was surprised writing the book — they had been steeped in the paleo-conservative worldview, many of these guys. And so they saw that and then they went with it. They got pretty serious about organizing. And then over the course of the last decade, they really have taken over crucial institutions in the GOP: The Heritage Foundation, ISI, these things you mentioned. They’ve shaped policy in the red states. During the Biden administration, there were all these floating test balloons for policy — the anti-CRT craze and Project 2025 are some important examples.

And then two more things I’ll mention just in terms of how this sort of works sociologically: they got J.D. Vance into the vice presidency. He was with them from the start, all of these different factions. So he’s definitely being more puppeteered or something. And then one more thing is just the cultural impact of this movement. Especially with the young men and the manosphere, that’s all sort of being fomented by the new right. And it has to do with Trump. Trump’s a useful vehicle for a lot of that, but the people I write about are pretty powerful there too.

Archon Fung: Yeah. So this is on Stephen’s thought, and this is a great discussion that we’ve been having already, is I think there’s some maybe on the right and in the middle who think ideas don’t matter. It’s just politics. It’s what Trump wants or it’s going to win elections. And you’re making a pretty strong argument that no, ideas really matter culturally, but also policy-wise, because a lot of the people holding these ideas are getting to do stuff, whether it’s the assault against universities or policymaking in other domains.

And I think that the normie liberal is especially vulnerable to the thought that ideas don’t matter. As long as we get the pragmatic policy right, you know, why do we care about these political theories, et cetera? We don’t need that. And you are both making the other argument, but then also, interestingly, studying a lot of people on the MAGA right. And you call it — or I don’t know if you call it or they call it — the ideas-first kind of right. So is that phrase your phrase or their phrase, ‘ideas first’?

Laura Field: That was my phrase. Yeah, and I mean, I study political philosophy, and I was drawn into these Straussian circles because they take ideas very seriously, to the point where it’s basically like philosophers write their books, and from that, history changes, right? I mean, it’s almost ridiculous the extent to which some of the people in the  Straussian circles just act like ideas are the only thing that matters.

Stephen Richer: It’s very appealing to academics.

Laura Field: It’s very appealing to academics. And I really like books. Yeah. And I’m susceptible to that. I think that there’s some truth to this idea that in certain moments in culture, these books, great books, rhetorically effective books, can make a big splash, transform the course of history. But they have to be in conversation with reality, right? Like you can’t just pull this off. It’s not just ideas.

But the way I think about the new right — and I think it’s not just the MAGA new right, it’s sort of American conservatism going back several decades — they’ve made a concerted effort to make ideas matter. If you think about the modern American conservative movement and, you know, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Young people in these circles think about ideas and culture. And they talk about politics being downstream from culture.

And so there’s kind of been a concerted generative effort for many decades to school young people in some of these ideas, form them and then execute them. And so, I think I was attuned to that mode of thinking; in the book, I tried to draw that out. It seems like these weird people who have gathered together behind Trump — because many of them are very strange — they understood that, and they have pulled off a pretty incredible sort of culture-warring coup, if you will, right? They’ve been deliberate about it. You think about somebody like Christopher Rufo, who with a very clear intention and explicitly crafted a culture war message about critical race theory that he knew was sort of untrue and just not the full story and just went with it because he knew it would be effective. And so I think they’re testing the limits of ideas first, right? I mean, there’s a certain point at which it crumbles, it doesn’t hold together. You can’t just work on culture war alone if the economy’s not going well. At a certain point, that’s going to presumably get back at them. But I think that is sort of the mode in which they think, and they’ve been quite effective with it.

Archon Fung: So, Sean in the chat says it would be interesting to think what people on the left think people on the right think, and the right is big, right? Including, you know, the Bulwark people and the Never Trump people. Those aren’t your topics, right? That’s not who you’re studying. So, Colette, if you could throw up that first figure from Laura’s book. This is who Laura is talking about and who we’re talking about today, very specifically. This is who you characterize and draw your circle around as the new MAGA right. And I just kept going back to this figure. It was enormously interesting that national conservatives are not the same as the Claremonters, are not the same as the post-liberals, who it’s easiest for me to engage with and think about because they’re academics. And then there’s this hard right underbelly as well. So it’s just important for people to have a scan of who at least the who is.

Laura Field: Yeah, that’s sort of a good smattering of some of the people I profile. There’s a proper cast of characters at the beginning of the book, too, a dramatis personae where you can see the full cast.

Archon Fung: And I wanted to make sure that we got to the substance of some of these ideas before too long. And I was particularly interested in two topics. One, what some of these folks think about democracy and why some of them reject the democratic proposition that the government should be the people who get to win the most votes and win elections. And then also a second basic pillar of at least what I’ve taken for granted to be part of American democracy for at least the last 50 years or 60 years is that we’re in a multicultural democracy — like who’s in and who’s out. Maybe the first one first, because I think some people in our audience might be surprised that some of the ideas themselves, not just the political practices, but the ideas reject the democratic proposition.

Laura Field: Yeah. So, I mean, I could go through the different groups, but I think it’s also just on a generic level with all of them that kind of fits into what scholars talk about when they talk about right-wing populism, where there’s a kind of rejection of pluralism and moral pluralism and cultural pluralism in favor of one sort of hegemonic group that is considered the real nation. And I think that the people I write about fit pretty tidily into that.

Another useful framework is, I work at a place part-time called the Illiberalism Studies program. And so there’s this new theorizing about illiberalism, and it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think it’s useful because it’s talking about countries that have experienced liberalism and then there’s a substantive backlash. And the substance of that backlash, which I didn’t incorporate this into the book, but I’ve been reading about it since, and it does feel like I’m reading the theoretical skeleton of what I discovered about the new right. And what it is there, just because it’s very useful political science, is an embrace of majoritarianism and executive power over and against minority rights and checks and balances. And I think that that’s definitely what’s happening. On the international affairs, it’s sort of an embrace of sovereignty and realism against any kind of internationalism, and it’s a very transactional kind of foreign policy. And then there is also just this embrace of cultural homogeneity. And that’s true across all the people I write about, right? It’s anti-pluralistic and it’s also in favor of respecting traditional hierarchies and recovering those traditional social hierarchies.

So, I mean, that’s a little bit abstract, but I think it does sort of fit with all the different groups I write about, perhaps with the exception of the hard right, which is sort of my catch-all term for the people who use more violent rhetoric, who are more ‘just sort of burn it all down, let’s destroy it.’ Or maybe even Curtis Yarvin’s kind of the upper tier of that, who wants to install a new CEO. And so I’d say generally they’re just — they’re anti-democratic. There’s different gradations of how this works, but they’re really sort of … But that doesn’t mean they’re against anything. They’re against democracy in the sense that everybody across the society would have an equal vote, but they’re quite happy to use majoritarian means and the strong executive to enforce their own understanding.

Majoritarianism is a big part of how they want to wield power. And most of them would not admit that they want to just sort of undermine democratic systems.

Stephen Richer: Laura, two questions. The first is, I lived in this movement for a long time, earlier iterations of this movement. I know a lot of the people you name in the book. I’ve seen the humanity of a lot of the people you’ve named in the book. Did anything in this project make you more sympathetic to the ideas or the movement while researching this?

Laura Field: Yeah, but I mean, I think in researching it and just unpacking the historical reasons for the dissatisfaction of ordinary people, going from 9/11, the wars in the Middle East, financial crisis — you know, I lived through all of that; I can understand the resentments and, frankly, by the time Trump 2.0 came around, I was so frustrated with the Democrats and the sort of feckless leadership, that I felt like, ‘Okay, I get it now, you know, I get why people are voting for this guy.’

Stephen Richer: You get some of the fury; you get some of the anger.

Laura Field: Just the fury and just the contempt for sort of politics as usual and how people and the leadership in the Democratic party —  Joe Biden I’ll name, right? — I mean, that was really frustrating to me; I was angry all of 2024 thinking, how is he in this race? How has he not had a proper democratic primary? Do they believe in democracy? I mean, I was very frustrated. And then just generally, you know, I have sympathies with some of their critics. I tried to draw the criticisms of higher education in my book and to give it voice in a way that I hope is serious. But I think a lot of what’s driving them on the right is racism and a kind of contempt for just ordinary scholarship and so I don’t have much patience for that.

But my own education was so formed by these kind of great book studies, these deep investigations and a lot of questioning about the meaning of life, and I don’t think you get much of that in our institutions, in our academy. I don’t think that people have been very good at it. So that I’m sympathetic to too — not how it’s shaped by Christopher Rufo, but the fact that there is a kind of decaying or there’s something wrong with our institutions.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. You celebrate parts of a Robbie George or Harvey Mansfield thinking about deeper questions. Does that sound right?

Laura Field: Yeah, sure.

Stephen Richer: I was hoping you could take us now to the present moment, and maybe with all those factions that Archon had Colette put up, sort of say, why have there been schisms as of late? Why are we suddenly feeling more of a fracturing within, I’ll call it the Trump coalition, whether it’s on the Epstein files that we talked about last week, or whether it’s the leadership of the Heritage Foundation or of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, we’re starting to see factions, and are they breaking along the lines that you’ve identified or is it for some other reason and along some other rift?

Laura Field: So. Yeah, right now it’s all kind of coming to a head because of Nick Fuentes, if people aren’t familiar, who was given this friendly interview by Tucker Carlson. But he’s a raging anti-Semite and misogynist. And the leader of the Heritage Foundation basically after that made a weird video for Twitter and said, well, we still support Tucker. We don’t have a problem with this. And then there was a huge amount of pressure that was put on Heritage, presumably by donors and staff. And he had to backtrack and apologize, and it was sort of this embarrassing thing. And that’s still sort of reverberating across the right. And it’s definitely something … I mean, my basic take on this is it’s too little too late. Are you kidding me? But the reason I think it’s happening now is that it’s the Israel question, which for many, many decades now, the American right has been fully supportive of Israel, and the donors on the right have been supportive, and it’s sort of been an orthodoxy on the American right with neoconservatives as well.

Stephen Richer: How do you explain, then, the Epstein question?

Laura Field: Well, the Epstein thing, I think, is just like people … I think ordinary people care about Epstein. And they campaigned on releasing the Epstein files. So I think ordinary people care about that. It’s a human thing to care about these pedophiles, these disgusting people who have a huge amount of power. And so, the idea that now Trump’s not willing to disclose, I mean, everyone kind of knows he’s kind of guilty, I would say. So I think it’s just a matter of people care about that because it’s a natural thing to care about. So that’s sort of not so mysterious to me. I think that the stuff with Fuentes and all of that, it’s like there are these awful fissures, there are these sort really ugly, as I call it, the underbelly, where those fissures around Israel were visible and around Jewishness and all that. There’s a ton of anti-Semitism there. But the leaders had been pretending that anti-Semitism was only a problem on the left. And now it’s become very clear and just very explicit that that’s not true, and they’re having to kind of cope with that and confront that. I think it’s frustrating for anybody who’s been watching this because it’s also full of misogyny, racism, and Islamophobia, right? And until now, there’s been very little concern about any of that in the movement. I mean, they’ve been kind of opening. There’s no more gatekeeping, as far as I can tell, for the last few years, so, does that make sense?

Archon Fung: It does. So, Joshua Haywood asks on this point, is the current rift that’s happening in the MAGA new right the beginning or the end of this coalition or simply a bump in the road? That is, you know, is the anti-Semitism fissure going to get bigger? Is the gender fissure, which I was kind of surprised to see over the last few weeks, will that get bigger or is this just a bump in the road and they’ll heal up and, you know, go strong in ‘28 and after?

Laura Field: I mean, I think it’s a very good question. I would say it’s the beginning of a bigger problem for them. I think that it’s … I don’t think it’s going to be easy for them to recover from this. I think that the anti-Semites on the far right are actually hardcore anti-Semites. And so there’s a lot of people who actually care about this and they’re not going to let go of it anytime soon. And so they’re constantly testing J.D. Vance in particular to see, okay, is he going to excommunicate us? Is he ever going to take on that role of this Buckley, keeping these fringes out? Is he ever going to draw a line? And he doesn’t seem at all willing to and he’s in this bind now. I don’t know how. Because I think that that group is growing and it’s very big. Tucker Carlson is still very big, and so I think it’s very difficult. I don’t see how those fissures are just going to be resolved, especially since there’s so much blood in the water, right, with Trump and with these fissures sort of among the politicians.

Archon Fung: Yeah. So Sean in the chat says, sad thing for the right at this moment is that the extreme right has taken over the discussion. And the problem is not that they’re very vocal, but because they’re the majority. And so in your book, you develop this idea of the cordon sanitaire, which is an idea that’s very big in Europe about maybe the center left should band with the center right to, you know, draw a hard wall against the extreme right. But if Sean’s right and the extreme, the hard right that you write about is growing into the majority, there’s no possibility of a cordon sanitaire, right?

Laura Field: Yeah, I think it’s hard to kind of gauge the size of this. I think that a lot of it’s performative on the part of these characters. Not to say that he’s totally wrong. But if you look at the midterm elections, it seems like the young men weren’t voting for this as much as we would have thought. I think a lot of these coalitions are very fragile. And my general take is that the American public is not nearly as radicalized as these online figures and as the intellectuals I write about. So, I mean, that can change. I think things are very dynamic. especially because it’s so cultural, right? This is happening very quickly, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t think that the hard right has taken over. I think that it’s messy and vocal.

Stephen Richer: Can I ask a question that’s been nagging at me for some time? If you read your book, you have to be struck by the number of people who also had religious conversions, not just political conversions, but religious conversions, and almost all of them were to Catholicism. Did you make anything of that, that it’s the type of person who is more likely to convert later in life to a different religion or Catholicism who is likely to be part of this? Or is that just, I’m reading too much into a few data points, but that’s, you know, that’s J.D. Vance, that’s Adrian Vermeule, and I think like one or two others in the book.

Laura Field: I mean, I think that cradle Catholics read a lot into this, and they have sort of thoughts about these conversions and how it’s the zealotry and the kind of drama that accompanies some of these conversions and the sort of full-on dedication. That’s not something — I certainly have noted it, but I don’t know exactly what to make of it, except for that — I mean, I think it has to do with our cultural milieu and how wishy-washy we are as liberals about meaning and about the social conditions around us and cultivating community. And so I think a lot of it is exploiting those, not failures of liberalism, but vulnerabilities. But I don’t have strong thoughts on the conversion. I think other people do, but I don’t really feel comfortable because it’s not my world. Have any of these people reached out? No, I mean, I tried to speak to a few of them. They generally are not excited. They don’t want to talk to me.

Stephen Richer: Yeah, I was struck by you end the book by trying to get into NatCon 4, which is a, I guess, an annual-ish convention of the national conservatives, which is one of the factions that was up on that chart. And for whatever reason, you’re not allowed in. And I wonder how much this would change or your writing would change if it was a dialogue between rather than, I think most of your book comes from having read a ton of their stuff, articles, Tweets, listened to their speeches. But do you have any sense of what, I mean, that’s too broad a question, but do you think that they would push back on your characterization or do you think they would say, yeah, you got it about right and that is what we are trying to achieve here?

Laura Field: Yeah, I don’t know. I think … I would hope that they would acknowledge that it was a good faith effort that I was trying to convey truthfully, you know, using tons of citations, what they’ve said publicly all over again and again. What I also was doing with the book, though, was situating it contextually and drawing connections between these different groups. And sometimes shining a light on how their actions don’t match their thinking or how there’s contradictions here and how it doesn’t or how it’s disconnected from the reality of American politics. And so presumably, I don’t know that they would like that, some of the conclusions I draw or some of the critiques I gave. I sort of said it like I saw it, right? I tried to be transparent about I’m critical of a lot of this. I think it’s dangerous. So, you know, I think it’s revealing that they don’t respond to my emails or don’t seem willing to speak to me. But that’s not universal and that just wasn’t my method, right? I think so.

Archon Fung: Do you have any insight, just following on Stephen’s, you know — one of the whole points of our livestream here is to try to explore different ideas from wider on the political spectrum than you usually might encounter at Harvard Yard, for example. And so viewpoint diversity is a big kind of watchword and bumper slogan for universities now in the post-Rufo era. Or in the mid-Rufo era, maybe. And so what do you think about the idea of trying to include more people directly from those four quadrants, from the hard right to the national conservatives, et cetera, in direct dialogue? And I’m asking that question because one answer might be obviously yes, and I’m drawn to that. But then I’m also a little bit worried that part of, especially for the influencer set, the point isn’t discussion and it’s owning or, you know, it’s kind of coming from a relatively disingenuous place. And so, I’m wondering what you think about the prospects of dialogue and public sphere deliberative interaction with the hard right folks that you’ve written about and read and studied.

Laura Field: I mean, my general response to the ideological diversity stuff is like, yes, we need more of it. And it’s very… I mean, I kind of conclude the book with a pitch for humanities and liberal arts that’s kind of woke and conservative that sort of forces people into these situations where they actually have to connect on these issues in an academic setting because… One of the things that I think is frustrating and one of the causal mechanisms that I think has contributed to this is the isolation and insularity of conservatism. But there’s plenty of insularity, right, in every corner of academia. And it’s a real failure. That is a failure of liberalism and of liberal democracy. I’m all for that. I think it does get difficult when you start looking at the individuals and the hard right people. I mean, many of those people have just abandoned any pretense of caring about the broader culture or, you know, about healthy deliberation. So, yeah, I don’t think Bronze Age pervert should be invited to Harvard. What’s his name, Curtis Yarvin, fine. I mean, I think mostly those debates are useful, but it means a lot of people have to get more comfortable being more combative. I think generally I find people in higher ed pretty squirrely and cowardly. And I mean, I get it. I sort of almost had to leave academia to write the book I wrote just to kind of be direct and upfront about what I thought. And so it’s very difficult. These things are not easy, but it is a failure.

Stephen Richer: So I will say for the class I just ran, we actually read Bronze Age Pervert as sort of a work of some influence within the new right. We did not have him come in, not because of any decision or anyone saying no, but just that wasn’t the nature of the class. Our administrators have allowed us to keep running past our normal time because a lot of people want to hear about the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court comes from an older conservatism. Most of them came up in conservatism that was formed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Maybe they weren’t as steeped in the writings of the people in your book. And they were part of a federal society that has been at times at war with the new right. And the president and many on the new right and Josh Hammer, you have him writing in this and others saying the Federal Society is somehow complicit in the degradation of society and conservatism has failed. So where does the United States Supreme Court in its current makeup, has the ideas of the new right made their way in any fashion to the Supreme Court? And you have a whole chapter on Vermeule’s common good conservatism, which is a mode of legal interpretation. Has that been injected into the Supreme Court?

Laura Field: Great question. Yeah, so I’m a little, maybe I’m a little weak-kneed on this question myself. My take on this, and this is I think controversial, and I don’t feel 100% on it, but no, I don’t think that the Supreme Court — there are six Catholics, conservative Catholics, I don’t think that they are — I think with a couple exceptions — these are not new right. And they haven’t been influenced much by the new right. And I think Amy Coney Barrett even wrote against Adrian Vermeule. Or said something against him. So I think that they are a little clueless. I think that they are a little unsure about how — they’re sort of in over their heads with the Trump administration and this incredible flagrant disregard for the rule of law. I think they’re in a very difficult position.

I think they want to avoid an embarrassing constitutional crisis that’s just like absolute, you know, that that could happen. The moment they try to really put up a hard line, I think they’re in that zone. So I think it’s very difficult for them. I think two of them are pretty far gone. And so I think that there are dangers there. I think that there’s all kinds of precedents that could be used in straining … You know, Vermeule’s book is not irrelevant. I think he’s hugely influential on the right with young people in ways that we don’t really see or understand. He seems very online, and I’ve heard that he’s very responsive to young people. So I’m not saying that he’s not important, but I don’t think that the Supreme Court justices are eager to institute his version of constitutional jurisprudence, which is to replace originalism. So that’s my take. I don’t know if I’m right about that.

Archon Fung: That’s terrific. Well, time will tell. Maybe we’ll know sooner rather than later. So we are running over. This is just a terrific conversation. A bunch of people in the chat said this is already their favorite episode. So thank you very much, Laura, for coming on. And folks can, as always, send suggestions to info @ash.harvard.edu. Stephen, any words for those?

Stephen Richer: A reminder that the book is called Furious Minds by Laura Field. And even if you might disagree with some of Laura’s takes on it or her analysis in certain parts, or certainly if you don’t like some of the people that she’s profiling, it is an excellent overview of a number of the figures who are thinking deeply about a new type of conservatism, a new type of ideas that is having purchase at least within some quarters of the Trump movement. And so I think it should be a book that should be on your bookshelf if you’re trying to understand the current moment or if you’re simply looking for a roadmap to reading more works by MAGA writers.

Archon Fung: Yeah, I’ve been recommending the book all over the place because it’s by far the best roadmap of this intellectual terrain that I’ve encountered. And it’s a hard intellectual terrain to understand and map. So it’s a huge service that you’ve done.

Laura Field: Well, I appreciate those kind words so much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Stephen Richer: And then lastly, I will simply say thank you all for your patience at the outset. We had a few technical difficulties. We’ll try and get those cleaned up in future episodes. And speaking of future episodes, we are going on our winter break as Harvard goes on its winter break. We will be thinking about how we can relaunch this in the new calendar year. So, we’ll be back on in about mid-January. And if you have any ideas, we always welcome those. The email was down there before. And thanks, as always, to the wonderful production team behind this. Any failings and certainly the technological failings today were on Archon and me and not them.

Archon Fung: Definitely. All right. So have a great holiday season. So my wish for the new year, Stephen, is that we’ll be able to take democracy for granted and that you and I can go back to arguing about the size of the state and how big or small the social welfare net would be and how progressive the taxation rate will be.

Stephen Richer: Absolutely. The taxes are too high. Minimum wage is an economically inefficient thing, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the issues that really mattered.

Archon Fung: Right. I think we probably won’t be able to get back to that right away.

Stephen Richer: I don’t think it’s in our future, but the… The good news about that is a place like the Ash Center here at the Kennedy School will continue to be very significant in some of these broader public conversations as a result of just democracy, quad democracy being a major issue.

Archon Fung: All right. Happy holidays, everyone, and see you next year.